Monday, March 30, 2009

We Were Busy!

We were so busy this weekend!!! I am getting siding put on my house in 2 weeks!!! Yea!!!! There is still a lot of prep work to do beforehand.

I do not want to show any of the after pictures until it is all finished so you can see the vast improvement. I will, however, show some before and during pictures!!

A little history of my house:The house was built in 1929. I always thought it was the oldest on the block because of the decrepit condition it was in. Turns out, it is the youngest house on the block!!! No one has ever done any improvements to the house (except for indoor plumbing, it was not original to the house!!) Our house looks like it is brick until you get close. It is red roof shingles made to look like brick. And, they are missing in several places!! I think someone did put windows in, but that was a long time ago. The windows were on the weight and pulley system. There are just painted boards around the windows were the replacements were smaller that the originals. Our front porch is a nice wooden deck...get to that later.

I got the house 8 years ago at such a good price, that I couldn't pass it up!! We have been working on the inside and are now focusing on the outside.

Here is the house when I bought it...

We discovered this weekend that our front porch wasn't supported. There was no support coming from the ground to the porch. I just could see someone falling through. There were cinder blocks under the deck, we thought that was the support. If you look at the pictures, you can see the gaps between the blocks and the wood planks!! We tore up all of the planks and put support under the porch. The pictures show the lack of support and the mess we found under the porch.

We also took down the square support beam on the right side, It was covered with roof shingles and was ugly. We put up a plain wooden beam instead! We also took down the black, metal railing. We figure since the porch is wood, we should have wooden railings.

During:

We also took off the old, cheap screen (storm) door. I am looking to get a new one that is more updated. The front door is new. We got it 2 years ago. You can see the difference in the before pictures above. This is the picture of what it looked like with the screen door:

I think that is all of the pictures I am going to share for now. I will share some more "during" pictures when we start on the siding. I cannot wait to show the before pictures next to the after!!!!